“... music-hall turn way past his best’), Woodrow Wyatt (‘always a bounder and a cad’) and George Brown (‘an alcoholic for whom the twin obsessions of drink and politics were two attempts to escape from some inner grief’). The aim of biography, he writes, is to understand an individual life by describing all the forces that shape it. Since the ...”

“... as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the ...”

“... and which, as the latest general editors point out, would make little sense if the poet was George Herbert. Long reprinted, Bateson’s preface has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For ...”

“... fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains while wearing a gorilla mask. In 1950 he went on a Fulbright to Aix-en-Provence. Not only did he immerse himself in modern French ...”

“... The young Hector was brought up in Devonshire by two supposedly harsh, repressive aunts. Like George Orwell, he served briefly in the Burma police. Invalided out, he was next seen as a near-dandy and struggling writer in London, somewhat given to practical joking. He was also given to what his sister Ethel, who burned his letters after he died, called ...”

“... The list of Leonardo da Vinci’s accomplishments is long and famously various – painter, inventor, anatomist, mathematician, musician and so on – but it seldom includes the word ‘writer’. This is curious considering his enormously prolific output. His extant manuscripts and notebooks run to something like seven thousand pages (though some of them are very small) and this is only a part, perhaps about two thirds, of the total ...”

“... for greatness; Yeats was virtually an autodidact. His father, a wit, a good writer and a gifted painter who rarely finished a picture, was perpetually broke and shamelessly improvident. He wanted his son to be a poet, but seemed not to care much about the boy’s schooling; and however grim the financial prospect, he disliked the notion that his son, being ...”

“... social ruthlessness, breathing, eating, sleeping, dreaming obsessiveness of a great painter or musician. In war, the spiritual anarchy of the great general confronts the physical anarchy of its facts and masters them. Montgomery had that anarchic power. And his company commander, together with a thousand other dutiful servants of the ...”

“... Lucan would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his wife, Kaitlin, much was made in 1974 of his ancestry, in particular the life and character of his great-great-grandfather, the third earl. In addition to treating his Irish tenants at the time of ...”

“... of it, rather than writings about the world!’ One of his most striking artist-heroes, the painter Fra Lippo Lippi, serves as his best spokesman among several in this. The poem begins with Lippo, who has been leaning out of the window for fresh air, deciding to jump for it: in this case the window is in the Medici palace, where he has been locked up ...”

“... of his incessant, unashamed repetition of themes and settings, which suggests the work of a painter (such as one of his beloved Surrealists) rather than a narrative artist. His stories stay in the mind like pictures at a grand retrospective, differing from one another in their superficial choice of colour or form but tenaciously exploring a ...”

“... much of the art that was looted, sold, hidden or damaged in the course of the war. Men such as George Stout and James Rorimer had to deal not only with the indifference to art of the Allied officers, and the antagonism and bloody-mindedness of the Germans: there were the practical and logistical problems of working in the heat and chaos of battle. There ...”

“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... like the equally impractical flying machine, was of anything like the same significance for it. George Grosz, an early admirer, concluded on meeting him in 1922 that he was an extremely stupid man; this would not necessarily have made him a bad artist, but it should perhaps lead us to take his theoretical contributions with a pinch of salt. What is surely ...”

“... Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann whom Lennon called ‘the exis’. Stuart Sutcliffe, the painter whom Lennon had recruited to play bass, fell in love with Kirchherr, a fashion designer and photographer. In most cases, the pop star’s rebel pose is laughable hypocrisy: successes in the pop world are egocentric, ignorant and conformist. Lennon’s ...”